Abstract
During a post-dinner stroll through the gardens of his official residence at the Hôtel Matignon in Paris on 29 June 1958, General Charles de Gaulle, newly installed as premier of what would soon become the French Fifth Republic, told British prime minister Harold Macmillan of the problems he faced in Algeria:
Morocco was a State; Tunisia was a State; but Algeria had never been a State. It was nothing but a heap of dust. It had never had any reality and when the French arrived there 120 years ago they had found nothing to build on. There were the tribes and disconnected and separate groups. The effect of the colonisation had been to destroy the tribal organisation without putting anything in its place. They therefore were now faced with a country that was the hardest of all to deal with because it had no real life.1
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Notes
Macmillan notes on Hôtel Matignon talks, 29 June 1958, PREM 11/2326, PRO. De Gaulle made similar comments to President Eisenhower during the latter’s visit to Paris in September 1959: Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years. Waging Peace 1956–1961 (London: Heinemann, 1965), 429.
Douglas Johnson, ‘Algeria: Some Problems of Modern History’, Journal of African History, 5:2 (1964) 223;
M. Semidei, ‘De l’Empire à la décolonisation à travers les manuels scolaires français’, Revue Française de Science Politique, 16:1 (1966), 56–79.
Kathryn Castle, Britannia’s children. Reading colonialism through children’s books and magazines (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).
David Carroll, ‘Camus’s Algeria: Birthrights, Colonial Injustice, the Fiction of a French-Algerian People’, Modern Language Notes, 112 (1997), 529–31.
Philip Dine, Images of the Algerian War. French Fiction and Film, 1954–1992 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), ch. 4;
Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘“L’Algérie dernière chance de la puissance française”. Etude d’un mythe politique (1954–1962)’, Relations Internationales, 57 (1989), 114–15.
Annie Cohen-Solal, ‘Camus, Sartre and the Algerian War’, Journal of European Studies, 28:1 (1998), 44;
Debré cited in Monique Gadant, Islam et nationalisme en Algérie d’après ‘El Moudjahid’ organe central du FLN de 1956 à 1962 (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1988), 65.
John Talbott, ‘Terrorism and the Liberal Dilemma: The Case of the Battle of Algiers’, Contemporary French Civilization, 2:2 (1978), 177–89. Dine, Images, 64–79.
State Dept. memo, for George V. Allen, ‘Relationship between Algeria and France’, 25 July 1955, RG 59, 751S.00, box 3375, NARA.
Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint. Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 19–24. 59–60, quote at p. 20.
See also R. Gallissot, ‘Pre-colonial Algeria’, Economy and Society, 4:4 (1975), 418–45.
Michael Greenhalgh, ‘The New Centurions: French Reliance on the Roman Past during the Conquest of Algeria’, War and Society, 16:1 (1998), 1–28.
Jean-François Guilhaume, Les Mythes fondateurs de l’Algérie française (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1992), 188–99.
Patricia M. Lorcin, Imperial Identities. Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: I. B. Taurus, 1995), 217–25.
Mustapha El Qadéry, ‘Les Berbères entre le mythe colonial et la négation nationale. Le cas du Maroc’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 45:2 (1998), 436.
Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire. Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 66–7. 159, 200–1;
Bruce Vandervort, Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830–1914 (London: UCL Press, 1998), 28–9.
P. Guiral, ‘L’opinion marseillaise et les débuts de l’entreprise algérienne (1830–1841)’, Revue Historique, 154:1 (1955), 9–34. Vandervort, Wars, 56–7;
Anthony Clayton, France, Soldiers and Africa (London: Brassey’s, 1988), 20–1. 52–5.
Charles-Robert Ageron, Modem Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present (London: Hurst, 1991), 6–8.
William H. Schneider, An Empire for the Masses. The French Popular Image of Africa, 1870–1900 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 20–1.
M. Heffernan, ‘The French Right and the Overseas Empire’, in N. Atkin and F. Tallett (eds), The Right in France, 1789–1997 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 91–100.
Joëlle Redouane, ‘British Trade with Algeria in the Nineteenth Century: An Ally against France?’, Maghreb Review, 13:3–4 (1988), 175–6.
See, for example, David Prochaska, Making Algeria French. Colonialism in Bône, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 5, esp. 165–78.
Miles Kahler, Decolonization in Britain and France. The Domestic Consequences of International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 74–5.
Jacques Marseille, ‘L’investissement public en Algérie après la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale’, Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, LXX: 260 (1983), 180.
Tony Smith, ‘Muslim Impoverishment in Colonial Algeria’, Revue de l’Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée, 156 (1974), 147–54.
For the discussion of Charles-André Julien’s L’Afrique du Nord en marche, see Michael Brett, ‘The Colonial Period in the Maghrib and its Aftermath: the Present State of Historical Writing’, Journal of African History, 17:2 (1976), 291–8.
Alan Christelow, ‘Ritual, Culture and Politics of Islamic Reformism in Algeria’, Middle Eastern Studies, 23:3 (1987), 255–69.
Martin Evans, ‘Rehabilitating the traumatized War Veteran: The Case of French Conscripts from the Algerian War, 1954–1962’, in Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (eds), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 73–9.
John Home, ‘Immigrant Workers in France during World War I’, French Historical Studies, 16:1 (1985), 57–88.
Benjamin Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli. La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1991), 125.
Paul Thibaud, ‘Génération algérienne?’, Esprit, 161 (1990), 46–54.
Regarding French operations, see John Pimlott, ‘The French Army: From Indochina to Chad, 1946–1984’, in Ian F. W. Beckett and John Pimlott (eds), Armed Forces and Modern Counter-Insurgency (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 46–67.
Tony Smith, The French Stake in Algeria, 1945–1962 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), chs 6–7, and ‘The French Colonial Consensus and People’s War, 1946–58’, Journal of Contemporary History, 9:4 (1974), 217–47. Smith’s views are examined in C. Harrison, ‘French Attitudes to Empire and the Algerian War’, African Affairs (January 1983), 75–95.
Salah el Din el Zein el Tayeb, ‘The Europeanized Algerians and the Emancipation of Algeria’, Middle Eastern Studies, 22:2 (1986), 220–33.
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© 2000 Martin Thomas
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Thomas, M. (2000). Introduction. In: The French North African Crisis. Studies in Military and Strategic History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287426_1
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